Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Did you drop briefing.com for pre-market gappers ? I have found that Trade-Idea's gapper scan misses a lot of candidates that other scanners pick up.

I still subscribe to Briefing.com which is invaluable for news driven trading events, as well as pre/post market information including gap scans.

Trade-Ideas scanner is user defined, so you can set wide or narrow parameters as your trading plan requires. For my purposes, I prefer quality over quantity. Especially as it relates to gappers. I want a short, tight list as opposed to a catch all. It would be too time consuming for me to sift through a long list of gappers, and I would miss most of the trades unless they occurred later in the session. Hence Trade-Ideas Scanner is perfect for me because it allows me to quickly zoom in on quality, and number of prints.

As we can see from the above screen capture of yesterday's post market action, GENZ had a high quality as measured by days and numerous prints, which signifies lots of selling into 52 week lows.

This morning IDCC had the most prints and was set to open at 45 day lows which is significant. SKYW didn't have many prints but was set to take out 52 week lows. I didn't get to the latter, it just blew right past me, but IDCC finally developed an inverse C&H on the 15 minute timeframe. It stalled after taking out the 38% fib. extension of the ORH to the base, and I booked a partial. After a lot of dead zone, sideways trade, it finally headed lower and finished the job.

I'm not doing a technical post tonight. In after hours trade, GOOG had the most prints lower, testing 39 days as GOOG's CEO came out with a statement that "we are not immune" to economic situation. Sympathy prints BIDU, AMZN.

7 comments:

I actually have Trade-Ideas for free (I was asked to test it)and I played with it quite a bit. I just do not like it for snapshot lists (History-timeframe). Once you get a list, the sorting capabilities are very limited. View mode-Group & Sort By... No real time volume, gap or price % change. TI's strength I think are real time alerts. If you trade from a fixed daily list, real time alerts are not useful. I actually find the alerts distracting.

I find that Briefing.com SCANX rarely misses quality candidates for the day.

I guess my opinion of TI is a little bit like your opinion of QuoteTracker :-)

Different trading styles and priorities. Just one point on Briefing gapper lists is that they do miss stocks gapping after they post. The gap up list is often posted almost 1 hour ahead of the open. I think you can download and sort TI scans into several platforms, but probably not QT ;)